Nero 12 makes you feel like a movie big shot

When a 13-year-old relative of ours asked for a copy of Nero video editing, we thought that maybe it wasn’t too techie for us after all.

The new Nero 12 makes you feel like a big shot film editor. For example, the program turned a shaky scene of a girl running toward her mother into an impressive slow-motion sequence like a movie. To get that effect, you drag the slow motion icon (it’s a little square that says “slow motion”) over the video clip. Another icon removes shakiness. You can apply a special effect-like slow motion to just a few seconds of your movie or all of it. If you want to make a 3-D movie, you can do that too.

We could take a movie on our computer and move it to a smartphone, iPad, Kindle Fire or other tablet. But here’s where a bit of the techie stuff creeps in. The screen presents you with two choices: “Decode Discs” and “Convert Media Files.” Both choices do the same thing, but one does the whole disc and the other just single files.

You can transfer streaming video as well. Anything you see on your computer can be streamed to other devices, such as a Roku player, Google TV, Playstation, etc., as long as your devices are connected to the Internet. You can also download video from the Internet and use it in your movies.

There’s still room for improvement to make this thing more user-friendly. For instance, “rotate video” isn’t listed in the “help” index. Yet this is pretty basic: Every video we’ve received recently was shot sideways. It turns out you hover over a video clip and click the “FX” link to get “rotate clockwise.”

The standard version of Nero 12 is $99 and the platinum version is $129. Do the free trial first and see what you think.

Fixing computers that have serious problems has become a big business. If you happen to be the one who created the problem in the first place, you are ideally positioned to fix it. Here’s how it works:

A pop-up ad appears on your screen and tells you: “Your computer is infected. Click here to clean it.” This triggers a program that automatically loads some seriously infected software onto your computer and then charges you to fix it. To protect yourself, what you need is common sense and a slow trigger finger, or a free program like Anti-Malware from Malwarebytes.org.

Anti-Malware has more than 150 million users and adds about a million new ones each month. We have the “pro” version, and it works very well. The nice thing about the pro version is that it protects you in advance, blocking the malware before it hits. New this month is an “enterprise” version for business. The enterprise version can be deployed on each computer in a company.

DavidRumsey.com has more than 34,000 antique maps, including the one that explorers Lewis and Clark made while exploring America from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

Go to the National Geographic website for a huge collection of maps, both old and modern. NASA has great space photos and some galactic maps. Remember, though, as the semanticist Count Alfred Korzybski said: “The map is not the territory.”

LD.org is all about learning disabilities. A recent National Center for Learning Disabilities report found that:

•43 percent think people with learning disabilities have low IQs, though there seems to be no correlation there.

The new $99 BackupPlus from Seagate holds a terabyte of storage in a drive that can fit in a shirt pocket. It works with both Windows and Mac and you can go back and forth between them. It automatically backs up all your files and the photos and videos you share on Facebook and Flickr.

The whole idea of a terabyte still stuns us. This is technology! A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes; a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes. A megabyte stores around 200,000 words. This column runs once a week and typically uses about a thousand words; so four years of columns would use up just a little more than a megabyte. It’s enough to make a poor electron gasp.

The drive uses USB 3.0 or 2.0 connections on a Windows machine or the speedy Thunderbolt and Firewire on a Mac. If you haven’t cottoned to the difference between USB 2.0, which has been around for several years now, and the new USB 3.0, it’s around three times faster; a 1.2 gigabyte file transfers in 15 seconds.

A “Protect Now” button copies all the files of your Windows computer over to the drive. Another button lets you download all your photos from Facebook. This excited some reviewers, but not us, because a free program, SocialFolders, does the same thing.

We couldn’t find a tech support number on Seagate’s website or in the manual, but Google comes through. This, by the way, is one of the most important things we have ever had to say to readers about answering questions and finding information — just Google it. If you type “Seagate tech support phone number” in the Google search bar it comes up right away and so does a Facebook support page and “Live Chat.”

By the way, this drive did not work when we first plugged it into our computer. We got a message saying, “This drive is corrupted. Would you like to reformat it?” The drive was indeed corrupted, but reformatting it made everything come out all right.

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